For independent film makers and students working from home, AdvancedSkeleton is free.

In that case i don’t think i can get support unless i buy a license which cost $750 and $3000 which i don`t have…

I will see what can be done with Advanced Skeleton for the Parallel mode and maybe i´ll check the “mgear” rigging system as well in the future, although the next character rig that i was planning to do was in blender…, so will see…

Why not ask them? If they are interested in selling more lics they should help you get a rig that wont crash.

Yep, i will try.

BTW, in maya 2019 i don`t have that purple edges when i have something selected that is connected to that mesh, with a BlendShape for example. Like we have before in other maya versions…
How can i have this behavior back in maya 2019?
Thanks.

But per face assigned materials are still a bad idea. Its near impossible to manage them in a scene with thousands of objects and variations. Wildcard system wont work. You cant select faces if you have only standins/proxy in the scene. For us its a nogo. Each object does have only one material.

You can have multiple materials per object by smartly utilizing UV space . For example, place materialA faces UVs in the (0 to 1) space and materialB faces UVs in the (-1 to 0). You do need working “blend/multi material” shader though.

I just wanted to mention that i save as .ma the animated scene that i was working on in Maya 2019 and open it in Maya 2017 and continue working there.
I enable from the beginning the “Parallel” mode and after several hours i haven´t had a single crash in Maya 2017.

With the very same scene in Maya 2019 in “Parallel” mode Maya will crash after about 5 minutes every time…

just to explain why per face shader is simply the worst thing ou could ever do in maya.
It’s not really a bug it’s just how the shadingEngine is working, and if you lose some shader at some point with per face assignment it’s probably because some mesh shapes were introduced in between and therefore loosing the track of the groupID node.

Look at the first case, you have only one shader on a cube; ok it’s working fine and the graph is pretty clean just a connection to the shading engine.

Now look at the per shader assignment it needs to create a bunch of groupID nodes to do some subtraction etc to keep track of this change.
Also performance wise it’s really bad, if for whatever reason you need per face shading a good solution would be to use SOUP, and basically having a routine that will actually separate the mesh based on the assignment.
It’s much more efficient.

Of course, I have a python script to fix all assets (break apart by shader, check for per face shading assignments etc…)

However it is the year 2019. It is possible to do per face shading assignments and Maya supports it officially (doesn’t throw any warnings when doing it.) So it is still a bug that in that Maya likes to drop shaders and breaks when referencing in assets etc…